The Emancipated Player


Farca Gerald
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

Elevating video games to the same aesthetic level as other forms of representational art, this paper explores humankind’s inherent drive towards aesthetic beauty and the creation of meaning. To analyse this specific type of player, slumbering in all of us, I propose the emancipated player. The emancipated player represents an open-minded and critical player type who willingly engages in the act of play and who primarily wants to experience play’s aesthetic effect. As a refinement of player involvement in video games, the emancipated player’s experience in the gameworld can be regarded as a specific phenomenology of play and becomes particularly fruitful for the analysis of virtualized storyworlds or video game narratives.

 

The Journey to Nature: The Last of Us as Critical Dystopia


Farca Gerald Ladevèze Charlotte
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

As an instance of the critical dystopia, The Last of Us lets the player enact a post-apocalyptic story in which human society has been severely decimated by the Cordyceps infection and where nature has made an astonishing return. This paper examines the ecological rhetoric of The Last of Us by laying emphasis on the empirical player’s emancipated involvement in the gameworld (virtualized storyworld) and how s/he engages in a creative dialectic with the implied player. In suggesting the utopian enclave of a life in balance with nature, The Last of Us scrutinises the ills of our empirical present and lays a negative image on the latter. As such, The Last of Us is a magnificent example of the video game dystopia and succeeds in triggering a powerful aesthetic response in the empirical player, which might result in a call to action in the real world.